Best Microeconomics

Cult bestseller, new buzz word... Freakonomics is at the heart of everything we see and do and the subjects that bedevil us daily: from parenting to crime, sport to politics, fat to cheating, fear to traffic jams. “If Indiana Jones were an economist, he’d be Steven Levitt… Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae.” (Wall Street Journal). “Provocative… eye-popping.” (New York Times Book Review: Inside the List). He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more.

Galbraith's prose has grace and wit, and he distills a good deal of sardonic fun from the whopping errors of the nation's oracles and the wondrous antics of the financial community." Those words become strikingly relevant in light of revenue-negative start-up companies coming into the market each week in the 1990s, along with fragmented pieces of established companies, like real estate and bottling plants. But, boy, are the similarities spooky, particularly the prevailing trend at the time toward corporate mergers and industry consolidations--not to mention all the partially informed people who imagined themselves to be financial geniuses because the shares of stock they bought kept going up. ( St. Louis Post-Dispatch ). "Most intriguing for its depiction of the delusion that swept the culture, and the ways financiers and bankers, wishful academics and supine regulators willfully ignored reality and in the process encouraged the epic collapse of the stock market."

When you read Dr. Darnell Smith’s Millionaire Mindset , you’ll be blown away by how easy it is to start a successful life – right away! Dr. Smith guides you through the process of expanding your vision for life, designing a million-dollar plan, and setting the right goals. Soon, you’ll be enjoying the good life with family and friends – and sharing Dr. Smith’s love of philanthropy!

Since 2014, international monetary agencies have been issuing warnings to a small group of finance ministers, banks, and private equity funds: the U.S. government’s cowardly choices not to prosecute J.P. Morgan and its ilk, and to bloat the economy with a $4 trillion injection of easy credit, are driving us headlong toward a cliff. "If you are curious about what the financial Götterdämmerung might look like you’ve certainly come to the right place... Rickards believes -- and provides tantalizing snippets of private conversations with those who dwell in the very eye-in-the-pyramid -- that the current world monetary and financial system is on the verge of insolvency and that the world financial elites already have a successor system for which they are laying the groundwork." An adviser on international economics and financial threats to the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community, he served as a facilitator of the first-ever financial war games conducted by the Pentagon.

We'll look at how money is not the only resource that needs to be managed, and a “life budget” that acknowledges your emotional, behavioral, social and even spiritual capital is more likely to lead to smarter decisions. We'll explore shopping and spending habits, identify problem areas, think about debt and make achievable goals for home, work and more. If you can pair your budget plan with a more nuanced understanding of your relationship with money and how it ties into how you want to live, the changes you make will be more authentic and longer lasting. Money and material things can make our time on this earth better, and they can help us move closer to what we find meaningful and worthwhile. I currently work as a life coach and health counselor with people who want to make realistic, autonomous, and lifelong changes in various areas of their lives.

Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.Bonus material added to the revised and expanded 2006 edition.The original New York Times Magazine article about Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner, which led to the creation of this book.Seven “Freakonomics” columns written for the New York Times Magazine, published between August 2005 and April 2006. “Levitt dissects complex real-world phenomena, e.g. baby-naming patterns and Sumo wrestling, with an economist’s laser.” (San Diego Union-Tribune). This is bracing fun of the highest order.” (Kurt Andersen, host of public radio's Studio 360 and author of Turn of the Century). “Freakonomics challenges conventional wisdom and makes for fun reading.” (Book Sense Picks and Notables). Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most influential American economist under forty. Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning journalist and radio and TV personality, has worked for the New York Times and published three non- Freakonomics books.

Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of business– Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in all of our lives. This eccentric and highly personal exploration of the nature of randomness meanders from the court of Croesus and trading rooms in New York and London to Russian roulette, Monte Carlo engines, and the philosophy of Karl Popper. Using his own investing experience and examples of others' successes and disappointments, he discusses theories like Monte Carlo math (easy; considered cheating by purists) and the concept of Russian roulette.

The main driver of inequality—returns on capital that exceed the rate of economic growth—is again threatening to generate extreme discontent and undermine democratic values. It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century , the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty , will be the most important economics book of the year―and maybe of the decade. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. Capital in the Twenty-first Century does all these things… Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world… But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving… Piketty, in collaboration with others, has spent more than a decade mining huge quantities of data spanning centuries and many countries to document, absolutely conclusively, that the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top―the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and .01 percent of the population―has risen sharply over the last generation, marking a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I… Even if none of Piketty’s theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize–worthy contribution. Whether or not his idea ultimately proves out, Piketty makes a major contribution by putting forth a theory of natural economic evolution under capitalism… Piketty writes in the epic philosophical mode of Keynes, Marx, or Adam Smith… By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution. It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty ’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , as a work of economic history. But on any given page, there is data about the total level of private capital and the percentage of income paid out to labor in England from the 1700s onward, something that would have been impossible for early researchers… Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention… [Piketty’s] engagement with the rest of the social sciences also distinguishes him from most economists… The book is filled with brilliant moments… The book is an attempt to ground the debate over inequality in strong empirical data, put the question of distribution back into economics, and open the debate not just to the entirety of the social sciences but to people themselves. What makes Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time… Piketty’s magnum opus. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has done the definitive comparative historical research on income inequality in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century . Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected… In a short review, it is impossible to do even partial justice to the wealth of information, data, analysis, and discussion contained in this book of almost 700 pages. He has re-emphasized the distinction between ‘unearned’ and ‘earned’ income that had been tucked away for so long under misleading terminologies of ‘human capital,’ ‘economic agents,’ and ‘factors of production.’ Labor and capital―those who have to work for a living and those who live from property―people in flesh―are squarely back in economics via this great book. Instantly influential… [Its] euphoric reception is richly merited… [ Piketty ’s] chief intellectual accomplishment is to show how the basic forces of capitalism tend inevitably toward an ever-greater accumulation of wealth at the tip of the pyramid… Over the past couple decades, we have started to realize that capitalism is no longer delivering for the vast majority of people in most Western democracies. Piketty has now delivered the most empirically grounded, intellectually coherent explanation of what is going on… His masterwork… That’s why the most successful societies of the 21st century will be the ones whose plutocrats read Piketty and help come up with the political answers to the economic forces he so powerfully describes. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade… Capital in the 21st Century essentially takes the existing debate on income inequality and supercharges it. [A] magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality… The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties… Piketty has written a truly superb book. It’s a work that melds grand historical sweep―when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?―with painstaking data analysis… A tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame… Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes it clear that public policy can make an enormous difference, that even if the underlying economic conditions point toward extreme inequality, what Piketty calls ‘a drift toward oligarchy’ can be halted and even reversed if the body politic so chooses… His masterwork… Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to. Piketty ’s new volume offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of newly compiled data that will go a long way in helping us understand how capitalism actually works. It makes for fascinating, grim and alarming reading… Piketty’s book provides a valuable explanatory context for America’s economic woes… Piketty gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory . It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years… Although the contours of Piketty ’s history confirm what economic historians already know, his anatomizing of the 1 percent’s fortunes over centuries is a revelation. Magnificent…Even though it is a work more concerned with the past 200 years, it’s no coincidence that the full title of Piketty ’s book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century . [ Piketty ] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…He makes his case in a clear and rigorous manner that debunks everything that capitalists believe about the ethical status of making money…He demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream--it says what many people have already been thinking…Unlike many economists he insists that economic thinking cannot be separated from history or politics…As poverty increases across the globe, everyone is being forced to listen to Piketty with great attention. Piketty has researched data over more than a century in order to derive his understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalism. Magisterial… Piketty ’s Capital feels very much like a Category 4 hurricane that hasn’t yet made landfall…Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle Époque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era…Piketty’s most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth--briefly annulled during the mid-century--ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow…The best reason to raise tax rates is not to punish the rich, of course, but to raise the revenue which the United States needs to invest in infrastructure and research, not to mention to pay for Social Security and health care. Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…[It] suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality…Without what [ Piketty ] acknowledges is a politically unrealistic global wealth tax, he sees the United States and the developed world on a path toward a degree of inequality that will reach levels likely to cause severe social disruption. If already existing agglomerations of wealth tend to grow faster than incomes from work, it is likely that the role of inherited wealth in society will increase relative to that of recently earned and therefore more merit-based fortunes…The arithmetic suggests that the concentration of wealth and its ability to grow will favor an increasing weight of inheritance as compared with talent…If the ownership of wealth in fact becomes even more concentrated during the rest of the twenty-first century, the outlook is pretty bleak unless you have a taste for oligarchy…Wouldn’t it be interesting if the United States were to become the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the last refuge of increasing inequality at the top (and perhaps also at the bottom)? The blockbuster economics book of the season, Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century , argues that the great equalizing decades following World War II, which brought on the rise of the middle class in the United States, were but a historical anomaly. Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century . In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty ’s latest work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , is clearly modeled after Marx’s Das Kapital . And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy--owners of capital--capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income…Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. Piketty offers a timely and well-reasoned reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity. This mountain of data allows Piketty to tell a simple and compelling story…The database on which the book is built is formidable, and it is difficult to dispute his call for a new perspective on the modern economic era, whether or not one agrees with his policy recommendations… We are all used to sneering at communism because of its manifest failure to deliver the sustained rates of growth managed by market economies. Piketty wants to return his field to what the 19th century called ‘political economy’: a discipline about power, justice, and--also, but not first--wealth…[Piketty spoils] the longstanding conventional wisdom, supported by economics Nobel winners like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, plus lots of less controversial characters, that capitalism is democracy’s best friend…It shows a world getting radically more unequal, the return of hereditary wealth, and--at least in the U.S.--an economy so distorted that much of what happens at the very top can be fairly described as class-based looting. Magisterial… Piketty provides a sweeping, data-driven narrative about inequality trends in the United States and other Western economies over the past century or more, identifies a worrisome increase in income and wealth concentration in a small percentage of the population since 1980, and warns that this trend won’t likely correct itself…Piketty is not optimistic that the forces of greater income and wealth inequality will abate on their own, but he is not an economic determinist. Piketty ’s new book is an important contribution to understanding what we need to do to produce more growth, wider economic opportunity and greater social stability. The book has made everyone with a stake in capitalism sit up and take notice…[ Piketty ’s] analysis should challenge Americans to rethink our notions of wealth and poverty and whether any semblance of ‘equal opportunity’ actually exists…Piketty has made an important contribution. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts… Piketty and his colleagues have spent recent years putting together a World Top Incomes Database, their detailed investigation into income in countries around the globe, spanning several decades…Informed by this historical, cross-country data, Piketty evaluates--and rejects--a number of generally accepted conclusions in economic thought, while being careful to note the limitations of inevitably “imperfect and incomplete” sources. The main finding of his investigation is that capital still matters…This book is significant for its findings, as well as for how Piketty arrives at them. When it comes to economics…you need to get yourself a hold of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty …Piketty’s study will have readers plotting capital’s downfall because what it shows is that the growing inequalities we are seeing between the haves and have nots are endemic to the system. Piketty , whose previous work we are indebted to for providing statistical verification that the top 1 percent of the population possesses a outsize percentage of wealth, has written a magisterial book about the ever-increasing inequality. Piketty 's magnum opus…But unlike many other authors of tracts from the ‘dismal science,’ this distinguished French economist has rendered an eminently readable account of the history and dynamics of capitalism and inequality…A lucid tale of why inequality in the world is increasing, and what we should be doing about it. The right leaning crowd may be dismayed with his prescriptions of stiff global wealth taxes, but neither leftists nor rightists can dispute the data that he presents…According to Piketty, the only real corrective to capital’s concentration is a global capital tax (because it is freely globally mobile), and a stiff inheritance tax. Piketty has looked at centuries of tax archives to formulate a theory of capitalism that is evidence-based and rigorously researched, but also attempts to answer the most basic questions in economic theory. Much of the debate over inequality in recent years is the result of the work of Thomas Piketty and his fellow researchers…This book contains important lessons for economists. Over the last decade or so, economist Thomas Piketty has made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…Piketty expands upon his empirical work of the last 10 years, while also setting forth a political theory of inequality. If Piketty is right, there are big political implications, and the beauty of the book is that he never refrains from drawing them…The book’s terms and explanations are utterly simple; with a myriad of historical data, Piketty reduces the story of capitalism to a clear narrative arc. Piketty’s Capital , unlike Marx’s Capital , contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself. The big questions that concerned Mill, Marx and Smith are now rearing their heads afresh… Thomas Piketty-- who spent long years, during which the mainstream neglected inequality, mapping the distribution of income--is making waves with Capital in the Twenty-First Century . [ Capital in the Twenty-First Century ] has jolted the right, who are scrabbling around for an answer to its main message: rising inequality is killing capitalism…It is a big book in every sense of the word, using empirical evidence from 30 countries to describe how capitalism has evolved over the past 300 years and is now reverting to what Piketty calls the Downton Abbey world of a century ago. Where much modern writing about economics is cloaked in impenetrable jargon, Piketty is not afraid to draw on literature and popular culture to make his points…Piketty’s book seems to explain the brutal world of the Great Recession and its aftermath rather better than trickle-down economics…It is rare for economics books to fly off the shelves. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares its title with Marx’s work but its argumentative verve with Mill’s, and it has been a runaway bestseller in the United States. Piketty’s economics is ‘data driven,’ while Marx was short of useful data, did not make good use of what data he had and generalized wildly from a few exceptional cases of capital-intensive industries…The book is a terrific achievement. Not since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 has a work of political theory been as rapturously received on the left as Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century …In this supposedly superficial and anti-intellectual age, his 690-page treatise on inequality, rich in empirical research, has resonated because it speaks to one of the central anxieties of our time: that society is becoming ever more fragmented as the very rich pull away from the rest. As Piketty elegantly demonstrates, as long as the rate of return on what he calls capital continues to exceed the growth rate of the economy (as it has done since the 1970s), inequality will widen to levels unknown since the Victorian era. The strength of Piketty’s book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of ‘political economy’ compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominence…Piketty’s book is a timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes. Thomas Piketty …has written a 700 page book on inequality which has achieved something few would have thought possible. To read the tidal wave of reviews by economics professors and others across the world is to get a sense of the impact that Piketty’s conclusions are having: that inequality is even more extreme than most experts thought, is worse than at any time since the 19th century and is set to reach nightmare proportions in the years ahead. Drawing on hundreds of years of economic data (some of which has only recently become available to researchers) Piketty reaches a simple but disturbing conclusion: In the long run, the return on capital tends to be greater than the growth rate of the economies in which that capital is located. What this means is that in a modern market economy the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the already-rich is as natural as water flowing downhill, and can only be ameliorated by powerful political intervention, in the form of wealth redistribution via taxes, and to a lesser extent laws that systematically protect labor from capital…Readers can already guess the dire conclusion that flows from combining Piketty’s theory with the plausible assumption that unregulated wealth leads to plutocracy: If the only way to avoid plutocracy would be to employ political processes that the plutocrats themselves will eventually buy lock, stock and barrel, then the only way to avoid being ruled by the Lords of Capital is to become one of them. [ Piketty ] has been perhaps the most important thinker on inequality of the past decade or so… With his book, he’s handed liberals a coherent framework that justifies the discomfort that they probably already felt about the wealth gap… Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income… Whether or not Piketty’s grand unified theory is exactly correct, he’s moving the popular conversation in the right direction. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics and the Laffer curve, as well as the increasingly fantastical notion that we can all just bootstrap our way to the Forbes 400 list… We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart. In Capital in the Twenty-first Century , Piketty sums up his research, tracing the history and pattern of economic inequality across a number of countries from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing its causes, and evaluating some policy fixes. Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty’s Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they’re likely to develop in the century to come… America’s twenty-first-century inequality crisis is, if anything, even more daunting and complex than the one we experienced a century ago. Thomas Piketty ’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, painstakingly details the dynamics of wealth and income inequality throughout the last two centuries, and offers a somewhat grim picture of the future of economic inequality. Indeed, Piketty argues that it is a feature of capitalism itself―unless governments take action to rein in capitalism’s excesses… But the value of Piketty’s work is that it shows that capitalism’s postwar heyday―in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged ―was a historical anomaly. Thomas Piketty ’s magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the 21st Century , is such a book… As leaders from Pope Francis to Barack Obama have proclaimed, growing inequality is the defining issue of our time. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Reading Thomas Piketty ’s famous book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, after all the fuss about it, is a bit of a shock. It’s both much more radical and much less radical than its reputation…I was anticipating a left-wing rant, but Piketty’s tone is modest and polite--not at all what you expect from a rock-star French intellectual…Piketty and his book remind me of my favorite economist, the 19th-century American Henry George, and his best-selling book, Progress and Poverty (1879). Capital in the Twenty-First Century might be more aptly titled Inequality in the Twenty-First Century… Piketty is relentless in his indictment of inequality…Piketty assembles a mountain of numbers and tables to demonstrate that economic inequality is intensifying; that the wealthier are wealthier; and that the rich own more…Piketty hits bullseye after bullseye about the exacerbating inequalities that disfigure society--especially American society…For [those] who suffer from the relentless blather about why the minimum wage cannot be raised; why ‘job creators’ cannot be taxed; and why American society remains the most open in the world, Piketty is what the doctor ordered. Piketty is concerned with the dynamics of income and wealth since the eighteenth century to draw lessons for the century ahead. Piketty’s overall analysis and conclusions cannot be waved away by those who feel threatened by the book’s analysis and policy recommendations…In addition to uncovering [some] fundamental contradictions of capitalism and documenting the ensuing inequality in great detail, Piketty’s book contains a large number of less central, but nevertheless very arresting insights and findings…Very importantly, Piketty goes beyond uncovering the dynamics of capitalism and the ensuing inequalities and goes on to suggest policy measures to arrest/reverse them. As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically…This impressive book contains the odd equation and chart that might not appeal to the general reader, but I hope this work will not go the way of A Brief History of Time-- a book more talked about than read. Riveting…[ Piketty ] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…One of Piketty’s main messages is that the structures of inequality societies choose to live with are the results of political choices, not natural or immutable economic tendencies, and that to pretend otherwise is an ‘ideological’ fiction…Capital inequality has dispossessed us of our ‘democratic sovereignty,’ and that’s something we should all really worry about… His book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality…When Piketty’s insights are eventually fused into new histories of economic and political thinking about global competition from the French Revolution to the present, the results will be...electrifying, particularly when it comes to revisiting the political and economic ideas of the global wars of the first half of the twentieth century…[This book] will certainly also shake the foundations of many university courses in political philosophy. Piketty darkly hints that the last time this happened, the world tore itself to pieces, twice, in an orgy of destruction that left millions dead and whole nations in ruin…It’s a rare thing to see economists, especially pro-capitalist economists, praising taxation itself, but Piketty--careful, unemotional Piketty--dares…Besides, he says, the thing every red-blooded entrepreneur wants to see is people getting rich by their wits and deeds, not by the birthright of kings…Piketty wants desperately to salvage captalism, even if that means proposing something that every capitalist will hate: a global wealth tax. The impact of the book will be [deep] and long lasting… Piketty has elevated many issues to a higher level by making the study of inequality as one of political economy embedded in history, data and configuration of socio-political groups… This book has all the makings of a classic. A book of such magisterial sweep… Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth. Using sophisticated computer modeling and analyses, the professor from the Paris School of Economics debunks a long-held assumption--that income from wages will tend to grow at roughly the same rate as wealth--and instead makes a compelling case that, over time, the apparatus of capitalism grows wealth faster than wages. Capital in the Twenty-First Century convinces because Piketty supports his arguments about inequality with two innovative forms of evidence largely neglected by his predecessors on both the left and the right. The first is an unprecedented trove of historical economic data, which Piketty uses to demonstrate increasing inequality due to the long-term tendency of returns on capital to outpace economic growth. Many who were content to ignore the warnings of [David] Harvey and company that our economic system will produce unsustainable levels of inequity find that they cannot ignore Piketty’s…His book challenges both mainstream economists’ faith in untested mathematical models, as well as radicals’ resistance to subjecting Marx’s economic theory to rigorous testing. New research from the Fed shows incomes of the richest Americans are bouncing back strongly after the crisis while average incomes have fallen…In essence, French economist Thomas Piketty ’s contention that wealth breeds wealth--and that increasing inequality is part of capitalism’s inherent structure, rather than an occasional condition--looks largely correct, at least since the early 1990s. Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities. When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate (which [ Piketty ] says is what happened until the beginning of the 20th century and is likely to happen again as growth slows), then the money that rich people make from their wealth piles up while wages rise more slowly if at all. This past July, I felt compelled to read Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century after reading several reviews and hearing about it from friends. [A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world… Piketty makes his case with three centuries’ worth of economic data from around the world organized in a trove of detailed but lucid tables and graphs. He still uses formal economic theory but regards economics as a sub-discipline of social science, alongside history, sociology, anthropology and political science and prefers to characterize his work as political economy rather than economic science. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics. The book is important, first and foremost, because it brings together a vast trove of research by Piketty and others on the evolution of income and wealth over two centuries. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how privateers use privatization, debt creation and capital inflation as a mechanism for rent extraction, with catastrophic consequences for public services. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. Piketty ’s great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts and contributions towards producing goods and services, nor do they ensure the most optimal distribution of those goods and services. Instead, they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, giving rise to what Piketty calls a system of ‘patrimonial’ capitalism in which a few major players derive disproportionate benefit simply by virtue of possessing high amounts of capital… As a work of economic history, and a source of data, it effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality, reward effort and innovation, and deliver the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people.

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. [Klein] writes of a decisive battle for the fate of the earth in which we either take back control of the planet from the capitalists who are destroying it or watch it all burn.” (Roy Scranton Rolling Stone). “This may be the first truly honest book ever written about climate change.” (Bryan Walsh Time). It sets the most important crisis in human history in the context of our other ongoing traumas, reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. She skillfully blends politics, economics and history and distills out simple and powerful truths with universal applicability.” (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ). Drawing on an impressive volume of research, Ms. Klein savages the idea that we will be saved by new technologies or by an incremental shift away from fossil fuels: Both approaches, she argues, are forms of denial. Ms. Klein is aware of the intractability of the problems she describes, but she manages optimism nonetheless.” (Nathaniel Rich The New York Times). We haven't made significant progress, Klein argues, because we've been expecting solutions from the very same institutions that created the problem in the first place. Klein's sharp analysis makes a compelling case that a mass awakening is part of the answer.” (Chris Bentley The Chicago Tribune). For those with whom her message does resonate — and they are likely to be legion — her book could help catalyze the kind of mass movement she argues the world needs now.” (Mason Inman San Francisco Chronicle). “Powerfully and uncompromisingly written, the impassioned polemic we have come to expect from Klein, mixing first-hand accounts of events around the world and withering political analysis. Her stirring vision is nothing less than a political, economic, social, cultural and moral make-over of the human world.” (Mike Hulme New Scientist). Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the New York Times and #1 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone and writes a syndicated column for The Nation and the Guardian .

The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. Although Lewis is perhaps best known for his sports-related nonfiction (including The Blind Side ), his first book was the autobiographical Liar's Poker , in which he chronicled his disillusionment as a young gun on Wall Street in the greed is good 1980s. He returns to his financial roots to excavate the crisis of 2007–2008, employing his trademark technique of casting a microcosmic lens on the personal histories of several Wall Street outsiders who were betting against the grain—to shed light on the macrocosmic tale of greed and fear. Lewis returns on the final disc for a 10-minute interview about the crisis's aftermath, including a savvy assessment of the wisdom of the financial bailout and where-are-they-now updates on the book's various heroes and villains.

Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.Bonus material added to the revised and expanded 2006 edition.The original New York Times Magazine article about Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner, which led to the creation of this book.Seven “Freakonomics” columns written for the New York Times Magazine, published between August 2005 and April 2006. “Levitt dissects complex real-world phenomena, e.g. baby-naming patterns and Sumo wrestling, with an economist’s laser.” (San Diego Union-Tribune). This is bracing fun of the highest order.” (Kurt Andersen, host of public radio's Studio 360 and author of Turn of the Century). “Freakonomics challenges conventional wisdom and makes for fun reading.” (Book Sense Picks and Notables). Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most influential American economist under forty. Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning journalist and radio and TV personality, has worked for the New York Times and published three non- Freakonomics books.

#1 New York Times Bestseller — With a new Afterword. “Remarkable… Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects.”. - Financial Times. “ Flash Boys richly deserves to be the first chapter in a new discussion of market rules and abuses… Lewis raises troubling and necessary questions.”. - The American Conservative. “When it comes to narrative skill, a reporter’s curiosity and an uncanny instinct for the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lewis is a triple threat.”. - James B. Stewart, New York Times. He’s doing essential work, and anything that embarrasses fat cats and encourages reform is a flash in the right direction.”. - Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press. “Lewis, as always, is exceedingly good at describing the complexities and absurdities of the subculture he portrays here… A deeply entertaining book, and one that illuminates how much our world has changed in less than a decade.”. - Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times.

The longtime home of the Soviet nuclear program, the Chelyabinsk region contained beautiful lakes, shuttered factories, mysterious closed cities, and some of the most polluted places on earth. As Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on power and war in Ukraine leads to Western sanctions and a lower standard of living, the local population mingles belligerent nationalism with a deep ambivalence about their country’s direction. Correcting the misconceptions of Putin’s supporters and critics alike, Garrels’s portrait of Russia’s silent majority is both essential and engaging reading at a time when cold war tensions are resurgent. [Garrels's] clear, patient, sympathetic portraits of teachers, children, prostitutes, doctors―the whole raft of Russian humanity―provide a pointillist landscape and an understanding of the country, and its mentalities, that eludes many more overtly political books." The search for a post-Soviet ideology has, in Chelyabinsk and across Russia, led to a strange mishmash, at once faithful and mystical, distrustful and fatalistic." Garrels keeps her cool and listens quietly as she gathers locals’ narratives and opinions, no matter how disturbing . Two of the best chapters, “The Taxi Driver” and “The Forensic Expert,” are like nonfictional short stories, wherein we become familiar with the long arcs of the protagonists’ tumultuous lives." Anne Garrels burrows deep into the heartland and enlists a diverse cast of authentic Russians to show why Putin happened, how he remains popular, and what might threaten his hold on power." "More than twenty years ago, Anne Garrels began visiting the formerly ‘secret’ city of Chelyabinsk, closed to foreigners because of its military and industrial installations. With great journalistic skill, Garrels helps us understand the complex emotions of people still in transition, trying to define what it means to be Russian." Save yourself a trip to Chelyabinsk―Anne Garrels gives you the grime and glitz, the hangovers and heartbreak, of today’s Russia, and all without a visa!" ―Stephen Sestanovich, author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama and U.S. ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union, 1997–2001. ―Jack F. Matlock, Jr., author of Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987–1991. "A critical and crucial study of a country with which America has always had a volatile connection, Garrels’s essays cover vital ground and are essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the myriad issues that inform U.S.-Russian relations." "Former NPR foreign correspondent Garrels offers finely delineated, meticulously researched dispatches from a region in Russia that seemed to her both typical of a certain Russian provincialism and arbitrarily chosen: Chelyabinsk, on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains . In essence, Garrels shows how the gloomy sense of ‘Russian fatalism’ poisons all aspects of society.

Immediately upon publication, Globalization and Its Discontents became a touchstone in the globalization debate by demonstrating how the International Monetary Fund, other major institutions like the World Bank, and global trade agreements have often harmed the developing nations they are supposedly helping. His book clearly explains the functions and powers of the main institutions that govern globalization--the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization--along with the ramifications, both good and bad, of their policies. In recent years, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization have promoted world financial stability, prosperity and free trade, yet Stiglitz wonders why so many revile these organizations' programs to the point of rioting in the streets. Stiglitz shares inside information from cabinet meetings when he served on Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and from his years as chief economist at the World Bank, divulging debates in Washington's conference rooms, naming names and raising his eyebrows at those who refuse to question certain IMF policies' repeated shortcomings.

Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy , now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. Praise for Blue Ocean Strategy : A bestseller across 5 continents More than 3.6 million copies sold worldwide Translated into 44 languages A Wall Street Journal , BusinessWeek , and Fast Company bestseller Thinkers50 Strategy Award for Best Business Book of the decade The Fast Company Leadership Hall of Fame Winner of the Carl S. Sloane Award for Excellence in Management Consulting.

Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?" They set out to determine what's special about "visionary" companies--the Disneys, Wal-Marts, and Mercks, companies at the very top of their game that have demonstrated longevity and great brand image. The authors compare 18 "visionary" picks to a control group of "successful-but-second-rank" companies. This book, written by a team from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, compares what the authors have identified as "visionary" companies with selected companies in the same industry. The visionary companies, the authors found out, had a number of common characteristics; for instance, almost all had some type of core ideology that guided the company in times of upheaval and served as a constant bench mark.

In Zero to One , legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places. What Thiel is after is the revitalization of imagination and invention writ large…" – The New Republic "Might be the best business book I've read...Barely 200 pages long and well lit by clear prose and pithy aphorisms, Thiel has written a perfectly tweetable treatise and a relentlessly thought-provoking handbook." “ This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.” - Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook “Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.” - Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. This is a classic.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan “Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America’s leading public intellectual today” - Fortune "Peter Thiel, in addition to being an accomplished entrepreneur and investor, is also one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long- term thinking about the future.

While many books explain the how of bitcoin, The Internet of Money delves into the why of bitcoin. With The Internet of Money, he's matchedthat feat by compiling his talks into one of the best books on Bitcoinfor a broad audience. That required people to grasp not only how thisunorthodox technology worked but also its profound promise for society.No one has done more than Andreas Antonopoulos to get them over thathurdle. As an engaging public speaker, teacher and writer, Andreas makes complex subjects accessible and easy to understand.

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. Written with a sparkling voice and breakneck pace, The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the "wonder" substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances. "Kate Moore's new book will move, shock and anger you" -- The Big Issue Kate Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling writer with more than a decade's experience in writing across varying genres, including memoir and biography and history.

“ Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read.” —Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? But Brooks features another trait that modern business writers, whether James Stewart, Malcolm Gladwell, or Michael Lewis, do not. Brooks is truly willing to give up his own views to get inside the mind of all his subjects.” — National Review “More than two decades after Warren [Buffett] lent it to me—and more than four decades after it was first published— Business Adventures remains the best business book I've ever read . Brooks’s deeper insights about business are just as relevant today as they were back then.” —Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal.

Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication. "A magnificent job of theoretical exposition."

This is a straightforward budget planning method that will completely transform your finances, and eliminate your money worries once and for all. Grady Harp. (Hall of Fame, Amazon Top 100 Reviewer, Vine Voice). " This is the rarest of all rarities - a really good ebook on personal finance. ". "Avery Breyer's self-help guide to consumer finances... is filled with great ideasfor getting out of a financial rut . I found her reasons for setting up a budget to be compelling and was impressed by the Money Tracker program she includes with the book... Avery Breyer is the best-selling author of the Smart Money Blueprint Series.Avery has been quoted on/in Woman's World magazine, Time.com, Fool.com (Motley Fool), MSN Money, GoBanking Rates, and featured as a guest on WOR 710 "The Voice of New York," on The Financial Quarterback , hosted by Josh Jalinski.

In the book, I describe the fundamentals of day trading, explain how day trading is different from other styles of trading and investment, and elaborate on important trading strategies that many traders use every day. For beginner traders, this book gives you an understanding of where to start, how to start, what to expect from day trading, and how to develop your strategy. If you think you are beyond the stage of a novice trader, then you may want to jump ahead and start reading from Chapter 7 for an overview of the most important day trading strategies: ABCD Pattern Trading Bull Flag Momentum Trading Top Reversal Trading Bottom Reversal Trading Moving Average Trend Trading VWAP Trading Support and Resistance Trading. For each strategy, I explain: How to find the Stock in Play for trade What indicators I am using on my charts When I enter the trade When I exit the trade (profit taking) What is my stop loss. Day trading is not gambling. That's How to Day Trade for a Living . If you just wanted to get started in day trading, following Andrew's guidelines gets you stated on the right foot. There are a lot of other books on day trading that just give you basic philosophy and market theory. To be successful at day trading you need the right tools and you need to be motivated, to work hard, and to persevere. At the beginning of my trading career, a pharmaceutical company announced some positive results for one of its drugs and its stock jumped from $1 to over $55 in just two days. As such, I wake up early, go for a run, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and fire up my trading station before the markets open in New York. I am motivated when I sit down and start working on the list of stocks I will watch that day. This morning routine has tremendously helped my mental preparation for coming into the market. Whatever your routine is, starting the morning in a similar fashion will pay invaluable dividends. Sitting at your computer in your pajamas or underwear does not put you in the right mindset to attack the market. In this book, I use simple and easy to understand words to explain the strategies and concepts you need to know to launch yourself into day trading on the stock market. This book is definitely NOT a difficult, technical, hard to understand, complicated and complex guide to the stock market. You can monitor my screen in real time, watch me trade the strategies explained in his book, and ask questions of me and other traders in our chat room. I know you will learn much about day trading and the stock market from studying my book.